Nostalgia

When you were a kid, you did, saw, heard, etc. something that you esteemed. Now, many years later, your appreciation of this thing is heightened as it is viewed through the gilded edged haze of memory which always seems to cast things in a more favorable light than in which they originally appeared. If I don’t share your appreciation for this thing, it is because I am too young, even though I am older than you were when you first enjoyed it. Am I missing something here, or are judgments based on nostalgia the most unreliable opinions there are? Interestingly, they are perhaps the most clung to.

Faith/Silliness

My first serious girlfriend was unfortunately named Faith. (It could have been worse- her sister was Charity.) We started dating sometime around the football season of our junior year of high school. We were just a pair of naïve kids who wanted nothing but to goof around and act silly. We were impressively good at that back then. We didn’t do much to speak of: played tennis, went to movies, went to church, ate fast food, drove around and made out, which consisted of little more than French kissing for hours. We were pretty adept at keeping ourselves entertained while simultaneously annoying everybody else.

We both went to the same college. Once there, I immediately became serious about drumming. It seems that was the first time I had ever been truly serious about anything in my life. Growing up, I thought I had been serious about Christianity, but now I knew it was just something I had always taken for granted. I tried to get serious about it. The more I scrutinized it the more it revealed itself, but not in the way I had anticipated. Faith and I still went to church, but now I spent my time finding biblical inconsistencies and logical fallacies with whatever the Bible and preacher said.

A fellow drummer, Roy, took me under his wing and we hung out a lot, alternating between playing drums and the card game Spades. Usually Faith and I played as partners against Roy and his girlfriend. Roy and I became very competitive; I’m not sure if it was with each other or with whose girlfriend was better. (It’s been 15 years and I just now thought of that.) More than one Spades game ended in whichever team was losing screaming at each other and occasionally hurling cards.

These arguments carried over into the rest of our lives. Faith, who was objectifiably emotionally unstable, would insist on arguing about the most irrelevant minutia for hours. From my point of view, she kept getting more annoying as our relationship became more unsatisfying and immaterial. We didn’t want to be silly anymore.

I would soon find out what I was going through was referred to as an existential crisis. It seemed only Kurt Cobain, Shannon Hoon and Smashing Pumpkins could relate to what I was going through, and then they were all fucking dead while pumped full of drugs. I didn’t know much, but I knew I wasn’t going to go that route. (Before I get busted by the chronology police: Cobain had already been dead. Another relevant contemporary was Trent Reznor, but I wouldn’t discover Nine Inch Nails until later.) Faith continued to be or became interested in things I found silly, as in trite; like hip-hop, dance clubs and football players. By the end of our freshman year we had grown apart, but we weren’t willing to admit it yet. We didn’t need to, as we lived in different states over the summer. Predictably, we broke up almost immediately after reuniting in the fall, but by that time, resentment had escalated far beyond what it should have and things ended ugly.

I immediately met another girl who introduced me to Monty Python, Kids in the Hall, MST3K and Red Dwarf, all of which reminded me how fun and necessary it was to be silly. I’d also learn that not all women were highly prone to mood swings. But it would be too late to fully return to my former silly self; my silliness was now of the cynical bent (except for sometimes when I’m hanging out with Carl).